Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn (part 1!)

Review by Perihelion

Welcome to our first-ever Dastardly December Devious Double Feature! Both Sir Peachy G. Harrison and I will be teaming up and reviewing the same book: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn. I read the first book (Legendborn) back when it first came out, which was in 2020, or the year 2 BBE (Before the Bastard Era), but Peachy reviewed it earlier, and I agree with pretty much everything she said. And there is so much to say! SO LET’S GET INTO IT.

! ! ! Warning ! ! ! The following review will contain spoilers. It will also contain harsh judgements, complaints, and snarky comments. Remember: this is Bastard Reviews you’re reading. We’re bastards here. If you liked this book (or God forbid wrote it—authors, please remember that reviews are for readers, not for you), read on at your own risk. If you get your feelings hurted then you have only yourself to blame.

I feel like I should provide a basic summary, but this book was mostly 600 pages of nothing, so it’s kinda hard. Basically: Bree is King Arthur now (sort of). But her boyfriend Nick has been kidnapped by his evil father (I don’t remember why, the reasoning was re-explained in this book but it was so convoluted and wishy-washy that my eyes glazed over) and they have to go find him! Except monsters attack. Wuh oh. Bree must learn to use her new powers! Except she gets attacked by mages/The Order. Wuh oh. Bree escapes with the help of some helpful ladies who vanish pretty quickly! She must learn to use her powers! And find Nick! Except uhhhh someone else attacks. Wuh oh. Ad infinitum.

Ok, now that’s over with, I can do what I do best: be a hater. *magical girl transformation into myself but with a worse attitude* I should also say I really wish this series was good. I’ve been missing the urban fantasies of my youth (o, how I miss those days, when tiktok didn’t exist and publishing wasn’t built off of Twitter) where a girl finds out about a Magical World what exists alongside our own and she gets drawn in and fights demons or faeries or vampires or whatever. Probably there are two hot boys for her to angst over. She’s got kickass magical powers. Listen. Those books may not have been High Literature but they could be fun. And that’s really all I want out of a book.

That is what Legendborn/Bloodmarked is on a surface level, but it’s also trying to be a commentary on grief and generational trauma and racism. Now I’m not saying fantasy books can’t tackle complex topics. I think they can and should and quite often do a good job of it. But it takes real talent and experience to write a Fun Urban Fantasy that is also a Meaningful Exploration of [insert one of the three topics listed earlier], much less all three of them at once. I think that this lack of focus is, ultimately, this series’ downfall. Its magic system is convoluted and overstuffed; every page introduces a zillion new Capitalized Terms for ranks or magic types that honestly have no bearing on what happens in the story. There is genuinely no reason for it to be Arthurian themed at all—it’s just an excuse to use the names and drop in random Welsh words. There are so many characters but they’re all totally indistinguishable because they’ve been relegated to being Information Conduits for the main character and the reader. Every! Single! Page! is full of explanation and infodumping. And this is in book 2!!!

Something that really, really bothers me is the author’s use of historical atrocities to lend credence to her worldbuilding. I also complained about this in my review of Addie LaRue. In this series, there’s a similar offense where the author frames the Salem Witch Trials as her made-up “Order” persecuting made-up magic users…instead of what it really was, which is real human people who tortured and killed other real human people. There’s more and worse. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more disrespectful I find this. Oh, you know who else committed this writing crime? Rick Riordan in Percy Jackson, when he had a character say that World War II was caused by his Greek gods/demigods getting into a fight. In this genre of fantasy, these sort of inclusions don’t add depth to the world being written: they flatten and cheapen horrible things that happened in real life, to real people.

On a less serious note. Let’s talk writing quality—or lack thereof. This book suffers from a malady that has become an epidemic in YA fiction: the writing is uhhhhh real bad folks. I’m talking from the ground up—nonsensical syntax, words used incorrectly—to larger-scale “everything is told, not shown” and “none of the characters talk like humans.”

An example paragraph:

He sweeps his coat back and kneels on the ground, long fingers trailing over the dents from my heels. Lifts the metal up, flips it over easily, like it’s made of paper and not thick layers of heavy steel. Still kneeling, his eyes flick up to me, considering, then back down. He twists, finds the sword in the street, and makes a thoughtful sound. Stands. Is back at my side in an instant. (pp. 118)

I had to physically restrain myself from re-writing those choppy bad weird sentences into something less choppy, bad, and weird while typing that up.

There is also an instance where a character “temples” his fingers (instead of “steeples,” which is the correct word to use). Odd word choice abounds, and is used excessively: characters “speed” instead of “run” or “jog” or “move quickly” so frequently that at some point I started to picture them zipping around on those stupid hoverboard things. “Hum” is also used a lot, in the middle of dialogue. I never quite figured out what that one meant. Like…saying “Hmm” maybe?

The dialogue is stilted and bland. Sel’s is especially weird because he never uses contractions and kind of talks like a character from a really low-budget period piece, but he’s not in a period piece, he’s supposed to be a modern-day American teenager. (Actually he might be Welsh, but that’s not mentioned in Bloodmarked, and if it’s mentioned in Legendborn, I forgot. But even if he’s Welsh he would still talk like a normal person and not a Walmart-brand Mr. Darcy.) And none of the other characters talk like that (usually).

Characters also drop paragraphs of therapyspeak any time anything happens. This is becoming really common not only in YA fiction but in like, zillion-dollar Hollywood movies and big-name TV shows, so forgive me if I seem annoyed. I’m sick of it! They will say or think “Oh, that’s why you did this thing, because you felt x and thought y.” You shouldn’t be telling me that sort of stuff—you should be showing it with context. There’s a point where Bree accidentally breaks someone’s hand with her Magical Arthurstrength and another character admonishes her out loud like: That was a bad thing you did, and it was not good, and you should apologize. And then she just goes and apologizes like: Sorry I did a bad thing, it was not good. Later there’s a “romantic” (ymmv) scene between Bree and Sel and the author drops like a half-page of Sel therapyspeaking in the middle of it. Nobody talks like that! If anyone starts therapyspeaking at you in real life your “sociopath” mental alarm bells should start going off.

The overabundance of infodumping also means that there’s no room for any of the characters to develop a personality. I remember liking Bree a bit in the first one, but I have no idea why, because in Bloodmarked she’s just another bland, generic, whiny YA protagonist. Bree tells us that her best friend Alice is smart and calculating, but there’s not really evidence in the text for this as she doesn’t do anything except tag along to unquestioningly support Bree. Nick is nothing. He’s blond I guess. William’s just there to explain background information. Selwyn actually does have a little bit of a personality but it's mostly just “jerk who is rude.” Actually out of all of them I think he’s my favorite because “jerk who is rude” is something instead of nothing—at least I when he’s on a page I can remember who he is. I can’t even call the other characters (of which there are about ten thousand billion) two-dimensional cardboard cutouts because they’re not even two dimensional. They’re one dimensional. Their only dimension is to be like “As you know, a b and c” to Bree. For FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE PAGES.

At some point the things that happen in this book cross the line from “boring” to straight-up “silly.” The evil Order folks zap Bree with a shot that… “neutralizes her DNA,” and thus her powers. You know what, I’m not even going to get into that one. Like where do you even start with that. Well, I made it through nearly the whole book, and then at the end Bree mindmelds with Arthur to use his powers during a fight, and she…ok this is not supposed to be funny. But it is because these characters are barely characters beyond names on a page and the absurdity of this moment made me lose it. BREE ACCIDENTALLY STONE-COLD STUNNERS HER BEST FRIEND ALICE AND PUTS HER IN A COMA. Literally she hits Alice with a DDT out of nowhere. It was supposed to be a serious moment but I’m unable to take it seriously because it was so goofy on top of all the other goofy shit that happens in this book and it was the straw that made the camel break down laughing.

Bree also turns into a dragon at one point. This was after Bree got Alice with the metal chair so by then I was just like “Sure, whatever, this might as well happen.”

Speaking of silly…the Big Bad turns out to be… “The Shadow King.”

What?

In all of Arthurian legend, after using all those random names, the author couldn’t find anything suitably evil enough to be the threat everyone’s supposed to be fighting against? The big world-ending battle that everyone keeps mentioning in this book is even called Camlann, so why not make Arthur’s nemesis Mordred/Medraut like the stories? (I’m not super familiar with Arthuriania, but I do at least know that’s the guy who was the death of Arthur). Why some generic “Shadow King?” What kinda cheap-ass cartoon villain is this. He’s gonna pull out the blue eyes white dragon and send Bree to the Shadow Realm.

Again, I’m not very familiar with Arthuriana. I’m just someone who’s read eight bazillion books (and saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail) (and has access to Wikipedia) and so I’ve absorbed a decent amount of knowledge by cultural osmosis. So I do know that the figures in the legends, especially Arthur himself, were complex and multi-faceted characters who were written like…well…people. Bloodmarked takes just the names and the swords and the occasional random Welsh word and smushes them up into 600 pages of nonsense. If you actually want to read something that pays homage to Arthurian legend, read something else. If you want a fun urban fantasy, well, you can do better. If you want an exploration of grief and trauma, there’s much better and more serious books out there.

I’ll give this book a generous 2 out of 5 knights of the round table because it did at least provide a decent amount of entertainment as “stuff to laugh at with the groupchat.”